


Come Back

by VerdantMoth



Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: Dreams, Hallucinations, Happy Ending, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Kissing, M/M, Magic Rituals, Nudity, Possessive Merlin, Reincarnation, Vegas, Waiting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-11
Updated: 2018-04-11
Packaged: 2019-08-23 14:39:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,879
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16620932
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VerdantMoth/pseuds/VerdantMoth
Summary: He gets another slap, this one to his bare chest and it lingers a little longer than he’s thinking is strictly necessary, but he sighs and closes his eyes once more. This time he takes a deep breath, smelling the residue of the hash they’d smoked earlier. Fucking hell but he really wants another hit because this fucking ritual is the most pointless thing he’s ever done and he paid them to pain his naked ass with itchy seashell ink. Where the hell do these Nevada bastards get seashells from?





	1. The Wait

Waiting, Merlin finds, is a never ending cycle. One waits and waits and waits, sitting on stumps, lounging on stones, basking on sandy dunes. It never. Fucking. Ends. He can’t remember how long he’s been waiting, only that the world is a much different place than he remembers it to be. Planes and cars and fucking cheese melted between bread and dripping butter.

Honestly, the melted cheese bread really isn’t the worst of it. Currently, he’s standing somewhere in Nevada, between red hills wearing nothing more than ink painted across his skin. It’s a fancy ritual that is supposed to show him some path he needs to take to achieve… whatever it is he is to achieve. Fuck if Merlin knows anymore.

But there are a people chanting and throwing sand at him and he’s pretty sure those magic branches are just driftwood they stole from tourist and painted with patterns stolen from cartoons. Seriously, he’s seeing Spongebob on some of this wood.

Someone smacks him on the back of the head, and he opens bloodshot eyes long enough to glare. “Pay attention!”

“I am?”

He gets another slap, this one to his bare chest and it lingers a little longer than he’s thinking is strictly necessary, but he sighs and closes his eyes once more. This time he takes a deep breath, smelling the residue of the hash they’d smoked earlier. Fucking hell but he really wants another hit because this fucking ritual is the most pointless thing he’s ever done and he paid them to paint his naked ass with itchy seashell ink. Where the hell do these Nevada bastards get seashells from?

“You okay?’

The voice is familiar in a way Merlin cannot place and something in him shifts uncomfortably. Or maybe that’s the sand crawling up his ass. “No, my dude. I am sitting naked in sand that chafes, with lewd old women painting bastardized runes on me, praying for some mythological king to return and save my disillusioned ass.”

“Dude?”

Merlin cracks an eye open but the sun is blinding him, creating a halo around the figure before him. “Common phrase used for persons of either gender creating an air of false connection?”

“I’m no myth, Merlin.”

Fuck if the way that’s said doesn’t make something in Merlin groan. “Holy hell I have finally lost my mind. I am hallucinating old kings.”

He thinks this is where he is supposed to burst into tears, like they do in the stories he’s read and the movies he’s seen. Or maybe he laughs hysterically until he chokes on air. Instead, he sits, cross legged and talks to the strange apparition.

“Oh, certainly. You weren’t always a myth. You very much existed, but people turned you into one.”

The figure tilts its head, and Merlin can make out the first bits of his profile. The nose isn’t quite right- it’s supposed to be a little more...humped, he thinks. The chin too, looks a little… smoother? Merlin isn’t sure.

“Am I at least a good myth?”

Merlin does laugh, though softly. “Sure. If you’re into incest and nepotism and patricide.”

The figure scrunches his too-perfect nose. Then he smiles and his teeth are all wrong; no snaggles at all. “And what about you Merlin? What sort of myth are you?”

Waves of apathy and exhaustion settle in Merlin’s lap. “The old kind or the clumsy kind. No kind friend to you. Certainly no passionate lover. History has no room for Kings and their consorts. One of us needed to go.”

The figure, Arthur, reaches a hand towards Merlin, brushes curls from his ears. “And you let them, because you’ve always gifted me the glory.”

Merlin doesn’t know what they put in the hash but this might be the best hallucination he’s ever had. Including that one orgy with the pope in the eighteen hundreds. He leans into the touch. “You certainly smell better now than you ever did then.”

Arthur snorts. “The power of modern soap, old friend.” His hand lingers and then it slaps him, gently. Once, twice, three times.

“Wake up Emrys!”

He blinks, and he’s on his back with his skin blistering in the heat of the early evening. His lips are dry and cracking and he needs water. He tries to croak for it, but his throat shifts like dusty rocks and though no wind escapes someone is pouring cool water down it.

“What see?”

Merlin stares. “What see, Emrys? You left us for far too long. You saw something.”

Merlin sighs. “He is here, already. He is here and he has grown up without me. He won’t need me, but I still must find him.”

The woman nods, sagely, though she has offered him no useful advice. “There are many ways to need one, Emrys. Go find him.”

Merlin stands, and his skin aches but he turns towards that inexplicable pull in his gut. Someone throws a wooden bowl at him and his hip smarts. “Put some clothes on first, you filthy heathen!”

 


	2. Found

Arthur dreams. Dreams and dreams, always dreaming. It’s hot here. So hot and he’s always sweating and he doesn’t know if the dreams are fever induced or just dreams.

There’s sand. Miles of it. Here, where he lies; in the dreams, draped across muscle.

He doesn’t get to touch, to taste in the dreams. He doesn’t get to speak. He only watches miles of skin self destruct, a stormy swath of hair grow more and more unruly.

He watches and he dreams and he does not indulge, but he wants. So deeply it hollows out his chest and weighs down the soles of his feet. He runs, until they are nothing but shreds, in the dream. Runs after the moon blessed child bathed in grey-green smoke.

He begs. He isn’t sure anymore, who he is begging. He believed in gods once, and then he believed in the stars, and then he believed… well, he know longer knows. He believes in something. Someone. 

Someone old, someone broken, someone so beautiful it turns the breath in his lungs to a sticky ice.

He tries to tell his parents. To correct them. He is Arthur Pendragon. Not Gregory James. He tries to explain to his friends that he is a knight, a prince. One day a king.

They mock him with fist and feet, and he swings his wooden sword with a practiced ease he knows comes from before. He wipes the blood from his nose on his sleeve, wishing for a red scrap of cloth.

Sometimes his dreams come with a banter he doesn’t recognize. It’s never him speaking, not the current him. It’s the remembered him who refuses to partake in the world of today. Arthur doesn’t blame he crowned king. Today is complicated, lonely. He does wish the king wouldn’t make him appear so ignorant.

He never gets to touch though, always wakes up before the dream turns to reality and he can feel sunburned skin.

The last dream though, he’d felt the sand. Tasted the red earth, smelled the sweat and hash lingering against Merlin. Last night’s dream had been different, and so he’d reached his hand out, just to cup his cheek. And he had, had felt the flesh warm and alive and so achingly dry with sun and sand.

Arthur has awoken and he just knows. Merlin is going to find him. Finally. He tries to remember the specifics of any of their conversations but the words, pointless and trivial, blur in one incessant stream of noise that tells him  _ find him. Return to him. _

He packs a bag and boards a train. He doesn’t know where he’s going, only that Merlin is waiting.

And he hopes he’s put clothes on.

—-

The lake is familiar the way the dreams were, the way Merlin is. He’s never been here, not in this life, not under this name, but he knows it. Has swum in it, drank from it, bathed in it.

The thought now makes his nose curl.

He sits on the bank now, waiting. Something in him wants to fall asleep, to visit the dream-land where he is old and new. But he can’t feel Merlin at the base of his spine, so the visit would be pointless.

Merlin is awake. Which means Merlin is coming.

Arthur sits there for a long time. Hours. Days. He’s unsure. The sun moves around but she has no bearing on his posture, on his wait. He will sit here until Merlin comes. His stomach rumbles and his throat is parched, but he waits.

And then.

Merlin is there, sunlit and red skinned, streaks of black ink swirling down his arms, through the hair on his chest.

“You couldn’t be arsed to dress yourself?”

Merlin laughs, high and wild and so giddy he looks like a child, desire in the firmness of his muscles, the lines of his face.

“I couldn’t bear to keep my king waiting.”

Arthur rolls his eyes and stands. He wants to reach out, to feel the peeling skin, to know that he is real and this is more than a dream.

But.

“You stink, Merlin. Couldn’t you have bathed yourself first?”

Merlin shakes his head. He lunges forward but Arthur steps back. “You’re positively filthy.”

He doesn’t miss the way Merlin flinches, but this is no time to coddle him. He puts his hands on Merlin’s shoulders and spins him. He ignores the spluttering and the rage as the man hits the cool surface of the water. Instead he shoves his head under.

There’s no soap, nothing smelling of cedar and manpower (whatever that even is) but he makes do scrubbing his hands over Merlin until the flesh is free from black ink and dirt. He’s still pink, skin still chapped, but it’s better.

“You fucking bastard. You can’t manhandle me that way anymore.”

Arthur gives him a blank stare, eyes tracking the way his hair drips, water still a little grey, onto the bank as he abandons Arthur.

“How’d you get here? Naked?”

Merlin rolls his eyes. “Magic of course.”

Arthur nods. It’s no explanation but he doesn’t care. “You’ve changed your ears. And you grew a beard. And muscles.”

Arthur isn’t sure how he feels, but then Merlin gives him a soft look. “You remember?”

“I never forgot, you idiot.”

Merlin’s brows shoot up into his hair. “How?”

Arthur shrugs. “Does it matter. Now you can help me. Help me remind others. Help me show people the truth.”

Merlin shuts down, a hard closing off of his face. “No.”

Arthur frowns. “I don’t remember you being such a coward, Merlin. Tell me, have I forgotten so much?”

Merlin snarls and it’s wholly inhuman, too deep, to smoke filled. Arthur  _ had  _ forgotten the dragon lord thing.

“I don’t want them to remember. I don’t want to relive the past.”

“That seems unfair and out of character, Merlin. They have a right to know who they were.”

But Merlin is shaking his head, stalking forward and Arthur  _ needs  _ him to magic some clothes on for this conversation. Merlin seems aware of this when he crowds into Arthur’s space, gets his hands in his hair, under his shirt.

“I will not share you, Arthur. Never again.”

 


End file.
